Primacies: Experience, Expression, and the Jewish Imagination

By Michael Fishbane

A powerful exploration of how literature transforms our earliest, preverbal experiences.

Primacies begins with the assertion that our earliest preverbal experiences are accompanied by a primary language--a universal expression of tears, cries, and laughter offered long before we learn our distinctive, ordinary languages. For Michael Fishbane, these "primacies" release the raw feelings of our existential condition and catalyze our most powerful literary expressions of sorrow, joy, and fulfillment.

In this book, Fishbane explores how ancient, medieval, and modern literatures express and transform these primal sensations. Building on his theological project in Sacred Attunement and Fragile Finitude, Fishbane offers here a radically new lived hermeneutics that seeks to do nothing less than redefine the relationship between experience and language.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226842118
• ISBN13: 9780226842110
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.